Telecommunication is possible in many ways. One can use a telephone to make phone calls to other telephones. Various technologies exist to make such phone calls, like fixed telephony, mobile telephony or Internet telephony. Tariffs for making phone calls can differ per technology, can be geographically defined and can vary per type of service. National phone calls tend to be cheaper than international phone calls for example and special service numbers (e.g. directory services) tend to be more expensive than normal telephone numbers. Besides making phone calls it is possible to send and retrieve messages via various devices and formats, like e.g. SMS messages with mobile or fixed telephones, MMS messages with mobile phones, email messages with smart phones, etcetera. Again tariffs can differ per technology and geographical destination and can be different for the various formats.
Telecommunication providers define the tariffs. Systems within the telecommunication networks detect the kind of communication used and the geographical destination and send this information to billing systems where usage and tariffs are combined to create bills for the end-user. A telephone billing system for real-time automatic detection of the best bill and of the best bill profile of a user on the basis of any number of tariff plans is known from EP1035724. It produces a telephone bill, intended as lowest-value bill, by analyzing the tariff plans configured in the system and basing its own economic processing both with respect to physical parameters like time (time-based, time duration), number (calling number, called number), zone (original zone, destination zone), typology (information type), transmission media (transmission media type) as well as with respect to aggregated configurations as friend-and-family service, “user group”, “closed user group”, “large account”, in observance of the logics adopted for the configuration of the tariff plans adopted by the telephone company. In short EP1035724 can analyze from the economical point of view the user profile and is capable of indicating the optimal tariff plan to the user. It also migrates a user automatically from a tariff plan to another so as to minimize the amount of the bill.
A problem of the known billing system is its complexity. Moreover it does not provide a solution for adapting tariffs of telecommunication services based on the usage of telecommunication services between members of a group account.